Well, hopefully we can start doing, y’know, the opposite of that. I see NPD and related disorders as basically being the equivalent of social “hackers” that are, far more commonly than not, of the black hat variety.
The human brain needs some more decision support systems built around it, and one of the best ways is by throwing a big 'ol security alert flag whenever one of these folks comes on your radar. Forewarned, fore armed, etc.
Sort of, I don’t like to think of it as out of nowhere, I like to think of it as representing debt. That’s all it comes down to at some point, a loan is a claim on the future productivity of a person.
Subsidies are just another form of debt in my opinion, the money isn’t any more real. They can come from bonds, shifting the tax burden, whatever, but ultimately it’s just a person or group of people who end up owing a debt (rightly or wrongly) to someone else.
As if all people gain personal wealth through productivity?
Towards the end it will be like the Amazon ratings. They won’t be able to tell the real ratings from the fake ones. And then they’ll stop the whole thing.
Smiles everyone! Smiles!
“One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages.” ~Thomas Friedman
Humph, if the system is still asking you for complete sentences, your BB score must not be high enough.
Peasant.
Naa, I suck. Big Data confirms it.
Wait, you get eye-mouths? I thought everyone got eye-genitals…
Shit, I’m really going to need some upvotes, people.
Incidentally, somebody pointed me to this short story this very morning:
A similar dystopia in a Western setting. Couldn’t happen? My own government is working on it …
“Okay people, lets denounce them before they denounce us.”
You appear to have a vast amount of faith in people, especially when operating as a group, and, beyond that, in their supposed ability to reduce their already-flawed situation to code. Might I suggest some Huxley?
I wish I had your faith in the ability and willingness of either governments or private corporations to implement such a system in the way you describe. Neither China nor Experian nor Facebook nor any similar organisations and institutions seems interested in creating such a “social credit” scheme for any purpose other than exploiting and/or controlling its (in significant part unwilling) users.
Facebook hasn’t been able to detect or quarantine its narcissistic and sociopathic users – to the contrary they’re willing to ignore that if it means higher MAUs. And in China the narcissists are in charge, to the point where “Xi Jinping Thought” has been codified into the country’s official ideology alongside the named thought of earlier narcissists. The situations not much better in the U.S., what with a deranged narcissist occupying the White House.
I’m open-minded, though: let’s have China (and, most likely, Russia) be the beta test before implementing it in the West. 22 years (one generational cohort) of refinement ought to do it – if you’re right and it results in washing out most of the narcissists and sociopaths in Chinese society I’m on board.
And how long will that process take?
It is an interesting proposition.
Think about how they might game the system, though. One reckons by being an asshole outside of areas for which metrics are gathered, maximizing their assholishness into single events from which their rating can average over.
Eventually, it is going to be harder and harder to correctly identify these people. Because humans are clever.
Then there is the problem of reverse exploitation: how can you proof the system against online troll armies?
As long it takes for everybody to have the equivalent of 4.5 stars out of 5. 
America’s most famous pathological narcissist threw the equivalent of one of those security flags in 2016, but he still got elected to the White House and approx. 30% of the electorate still supports him. A large part of that is a broken Electoral College system, but an even larger part are people who like narcissists and sociopaths.
The Moustache of Wisdom must need a good scrubbing whenever it returns from a trip to China.
I like the idea in principle. Of course, implementing it successfully is another matter…
And yet another thing is all the unforseen consequences. How much of our time would be spent hassling folks to give us good ratings, for example? EBay transactions spring to mind.
its like they saw that episode of black mirror and thought “wow, what a great idea!”. From what I’ve heard about living in a “communist” country, everyone is always worried that if they stick out in any their neighbors will turn them in to the government.
